Color Commentary

Once upon a time, in the deeper reaches of your cable box, you could stumble across a show called “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” The program, which bounced across several networks from 1988 to 1999 and was known to its devotees as MST3K, was about a goofball named Joel, who, having been marooned in space and forced to watch crummy movies like “Teenagers from Outer Space” and “War of the Colossal Beast,” quipped his way through it all with the help of his wisecracking robot pals. The premise was shaky, but the execution was so delightful that the show inspired an industry of riffing on lame pop culture, from “Pop Up Video” to “Talk Soup” to “Chelsea Lately” to everyone live-tweeting the Oscars with zingers like “Nice dress—not!”

A while back, the five members of the MST3K gang, who have toured since 2007 as a live act called Cinematic Titanic, appeared at Broadway’s Best Buy Theatre. Backstage, the performers—who, with their dark shirts and their eerily pale skin, seemed like affable vampires—expressed bewilderment at the avalanche of meta-scorn they had inadvertently touched off. Joel Hodgson, the show’s creator and star, observed, “You can sell an audience on snark, but they’ll get tired of it. Our idea was always just that we’re the perfect companions to watch a bad movie with.”

The group treated that night’s film, a 1974 gem of kung-fu blaxploitation called “East Meets Watts,” as the occasion for a freewheeling variety act, complete with songs and spit takes. As a chop-socky master named Larry Chin and a black stud named—without apparent irony—Stud Brown laid waste to most of the hoods and ’hoods in Los Angeles, the comics pounced on every wayward detail, from the actors’ names (“Alan Tang: the B-movie actor astronauts use”) to the awkwardness of a clinch between an aging cop and a starlet (“If you ever wondered what it would be like to watch your dad make out with a hooker, sit back and enjoy”). Their more than six hundred jokes included the mashups “That Seventies Shogun” and “The Jackson Pollock Five,” and invoked Thomas the Tank Engine, R.E.M. lyrics, the Fonz, bird flu, Lee Harvey Oswald, NASCAR, and Pantene. The rapt, devotional quality of the audience’s laughter made it feel like a Phish concert, only enjoyable.

The group explained backstage that jokes are allotted according to each comedian’s strengths: Hodgson gets the run-on musings, Frank Conniff the screams and non sequiturs, Trace Beaulieu the character impressions, J. Elvis Weinstein the songs and truck sounds. “Also, you do a really good barge,” Mary Jo Pehl told Weinstein. “And when Mary Jo does men it’s hilarious,” Hodgson said. “Like in tonight’s movie, when Aldo Ray”—playing the aging cop—“looks through binoculars at the harbor, and she does his voice-over talking about the boats like a pervert, like, ‘Oh, baby, show Daddy the masts.’ ” Everyone cracked up at Hodgson (imperceptibly) doing Pehl (impeccably) doing Ray (implausibly) as a peeping Tom.

Hodgson noted that when MST3K began, even displaying the silhouettes of Joel and the robots was provocative: “You’d never see anything crawling across the screen except severe storm warnings.” Conniff added, “And now, every movie that’s on basic cable or network, suddenly a character from another show walks across and says, ‘Hey, watch “Two and a Half Men”!’ as you’re trying to watch Fredo get killed on ‘The Godfather.’ Everything got all meta and confused when ‘Snakes on a Plane’ came out”—in 2006—“and it was marketed as a movie you could go make fun of. What happened to the sincerity?”

“There was a big wave of not caring anymore,” Beaulieu said.

When the group started touring, they sought to frame a rationale for Cinematic Titanic’s efforts, something to parallel MST3K’s conceit that scientists were studying the effect of bad movies on Joel’s brain. Weinstein hazily recalled, “We were under the Earth because we’d been abducted, or recruited by some corporate overlord—”

“We were struggling toward some kind of story,” Hodgson interjected. “Because we felt that if people are just talking to a movie for no reason they’re assholes. But it turns out that audiences accept that people can now talk to a movie just because.”

Weinstein said, “Our ‘Why are we doing this?’ turned out to be ‘We do this for a living.’ ”

“And because our audiences provide me with the love that’s so lacking in my life otherwise,” Conniff said.

“From a distance and in a group,” Beaulieu clarified.

Weinstein continued, “There’s no reason to ever quit. I mean, it’s already sad. Look at us—aging, fat, balding.” He threw up his hands cheerfully. “So what the hell.”

On December 30th, after six years, Cinematic Titanic performed its final show; the group finally got sick of it. As Conniff said at the Best Buy Theatre, “It kills my spirit a little to know that I’ve watched ‘Santa Claus Conquers the Martians’ more than I’ve watched ‘Citizen Kane.’ ” ♦